Bill Gates hires open source icon Linus Torvalds? That was just the beginning of Redmond's hybrid strategy to face the free software age.

When you hired me three years ago, you had to realize that I was going to speak my mind, no matter what the consequences. You told me that if I ever hit a wall with Steve or his people, I should let you know. Well, here goes. (Yes, again.) After all our technical and strategic conflicts, I bet you never guessed we'd be at each other's throats over a matter of pronunciation. But the fact is, when Steve goes to a marketing meeting, as he did yesterday, and pronounces our desktop system "Winux," he jeopardizes not only my personal reputation, but, more important, the very foundation of our business and software approach for the next decade. The desktop system is not "Winux," as in Linux. As he knows very well. WinX is pronounced like "winks." Why is this important? Because the name WinX was not random. It was deliberately chosen to express the strategy behind a 24-month engineering marathon inside Microsoft. We've built a Windows desktop and application framework around a Linux operating system, and both sides of this equation - open source and proprietary - are needed for our plan to continue to work. By talking about "Winux," Steve blurs the distinction between Linux and WinX. Worse, he implies that we have taken over Linux for our own selfish ends. This makes the development community nervous, slows contributions from coders, and creates a huge amount of unnecessary noise.